9 Jan
2017
9 Jan
'17
2:37 a.m.
There was thread 'Unix stories' were Stephen Bourne played role.
Here another story about Stephen Bourne. He worked first on Algol 68,
than joined the Unix team at Bell labs and wrote sh and adb. It's well
known that the if-fi and case-esac notation from Algol came to shell
syntax this way.
Maybe less know is that Bourne tried as hard as he could to make the
C code of sh and adb look like Algol, with the help of preprocessor
macros. I stumbled across this when I looked into the 2.11BSD code
base some time ago. Look at
http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/sh/main.c.html
http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/adb/main.c.html
to enjoy C with an Algol-look. The definitions are in
http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/sh/mac.h.html
http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/211bsd/usr/src/bin/adb/defs.h.html
Cheers, Walter